Jordanmechner.com announces the recently rediscovered source code for Prince of Persia has been rescued from their ephemeral home on some ancient floppy discs, and is now available for download from GitHub. He goes on to discuss the reasons for going to such extra effort to make all this come together, the value of digital archaeology, and his suggestion that developers backup their backups. The read me accompanying the source download explains that Mechner has no issue with people studying and compiling the code, but that this does not grant any rights to create or distribute Prince of Persia games, as the rights to the franchise remain firmly in the hands of Ubisoft.

Sounds like the recovery is even more impressive, since they used a special program to be able to store more on disks.

Roland Gustafsson, author of the special 18-sector RWTS routines that had made our disks super-efficient in 1988 (and unreadable to anyone but us), was able to get on IRC in 2012 and explain what he’d done to Discferret kids who weren’t born then.[...]From a preservationist point of view, the POP source code slipped through a window that is rapidly closing. Anyone who turns up a 1980s disk archive 20 or 30 years from now may be out of luck.[...]Because now is the time.Back up your backupsJason suggests the following rule of thumb: If you have data you want to keep for posterity, follow the Russian doll approach. Back up your old 20GB hard drives into a folder on your new 200GB hard drive. Next year, back up your 200GB hard drive into a folder on your new 1TB hard drive. And so on into the future.

The assembly source code is very clean, and the documentation Mechner wrote for those who would port PoP to other systems shows how detailed and precise he was.Of course a big part of this was how everything needed to fit in minuscule amounts of memory...